Interesting read. My freelance work has never been by the hour, and for reasons that align with those mentioned in the article. Clients don't care about hours

Interesting read. My freelance work has never been by the hour, and for reasons that align with those mentioned in the article. Clients don't care about hours I spend, my hours bring no value to them. They desire a certain result, and they know how much that result is worth to them. For my freelance tasks, I've put forth a rather steep one-time price for the solution of the specific problem at hand. The condition: The price is paid when the problem is solved, if not, the service was not delivered, they don't pay. This works out beautifully for the client, they run no risk (except the delay in waiting for me to fail so they can try someone else), and they know exactly what they pay. It works out nice for me, since I have a reasonable idea whether I can solve the problem or not. Hourly rates for those tasks have been close to $1000, including failed tasks where I spent some days not solving the problem. In the end, it's also very fair to both parties.. It's reasonable to expect the agreed-upon result when paying someone to do something. It's also unreasonable to expect to get paid for not doing what was agreed upon. A concrete example I can talk about was a client whose database had started "acting up a lot" and they had no idea what was wrong, they were very friendly and told me they had contacted another company too who had quoted an hourly price around $200 but were unwilling to estimate how much time they would need, since they didn't know what the problem was. So I said, "I'll try and fix it, if I succeed it'll be $4000", that's a fair amount of money, sure, but it was pretty good value to them to get their inventory database back up. It turned out to be an unhandled edge-case that only showed up years after when they introduced a new kind of item into the database. I had to learn a little bit of VBA(!) to fix it, but in the end, it took about 2 hours, and you might argue that price is too much for those two hours, but they didn't pay me to spend 2 hours, they paid me to get their database working again.